crept back a couple of days after the soldiers left.
"Barna...," I said, and Ater said, "They said the soldiers cut off his head and kicked it around like a ball."
It was very hard to ask about any of the others. When I did, Ater had no answers; often he seemed not even to know who I was talking about. Chamry? He shrugged. Venne? He didn't know. Diero? He didn't know. But evidently a number of people had escaped one way or another, and many of them had regathered in the ruined city, not knowing where else to go. Some of the grain supplies had remained hidden and untouched, and they had lived off them and what was left of the gardens. For how long? Again Ater was vague. I guessed that the raid and fire had been about half a year ago, perhaps in early winter.
"You're going back there now?" I asked him, and he nodded. "It's safer there," he said. "The soldiers been raiding everywhere. Taking slaves. I was at Ebbera, over there. Near as bad off as we are. No slaves left to work the fields."
"I'll come with you," I said. I had to know what had become of my friends.
I'd caught five more good-sized fish. I packed them up in leaves and we set off. We came to the Heart of the Forest in the late afternoon.
The city I had last seen silver-blue in moonlight was a waste of charred beams, shapeless mounds, ashfields. At one edge, near the gardens, people had made huts and shelters with salvaged lumber, much of it half burned. An old woman was weeding in the garden, bowed back, averted face. A couple of men sat in the doorways of their huts, their hands hanging between their knees. A dog barked at us, then whined and cowered away. A child sat on the dirt gazing listlessly at Ater and me. As we came near, it too cowered away from us.
I had come in order to ask about my friends, but I could not ask. I could only see Diero trapped in Barna's house as it burned, Chamry's corpse dumped in a common grave, Venne driven down the road in chains. I said to Ater, "I can't stay here." I gave him the packet of fish. "Share it with somebody," I said.
"Where you going then?" he asked in his blank way.
"North."
"Look out for slave takers," Ater said.
I was about to turn back the way we'd come, when something grabbed both my legs so hard and suddenly that I nearly lost my balance. It was a child, the child who'd stared and shrunk from us. "Beaky, Beaky, Beaky," she cried in a high thin voice like a bird. "Oh Beaky, oh Beaky."
I had to pry her hands loose from my legs, and then she gripped my hands with sparrow-claw fingers, looking up into my face, her face all dust and bone and tears.
"Melle."
She pulled me to her. I picked her up. She weighed nothing, it was like picking up a ghost. She clung to me tightly, just as she used to when I came to Diero's room to teach her letters. She hid her face against my shoulder.
"Where does she live." I asked Ater, who had stopped to stare at us. He pointed to a hut nearby. I started to carry her towards it.
"Don't go there," she whispered, "don't go there."
"Where do you live then, Melle."
"Nowhere."
A man looked from the doorway of the hut that Ater had pointed out. I'd seen him working as a carpenter but had never known his name. He too had the dull look, the siege face.
"Where's the girl's sister?" I asked him.
He shrugged.
"Diero didn't—escape—did she?"
The man shrugged again, this time with a grinning sneer at the question. Gradually his look sharpened. He said, "You want that one?"
I stared at him.
"Half a bronze for the night," he said. "Or food, if you've got any." He stepped forward, trying to get a look at my backpack.
I went through a quick, complex set of thoughts. I said, "What I have I keep," and set straight off walking back the way I'd come. Melle clung to my neck, silent, her face hidden.
The man shouted after me and the dog, barking, set off other dogs in a chorus of barks and howls. I drew my knife, glancing back constantly. But nobody followed us.
When I'd walked a half mile or so I knew that my little ghost was a great deal more solid than I'd